1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus, a computer program product, and a method for processing a picture used for identifying and searching persons appearing in the picture.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, broadcast-program recording apparatuses that are operable to identify persons appearing in the pictures in such a manner that a search can be conducted for the persons have been developed.
In such broadcast-program recording apparatuses, a face area is detected out of each image first. Secondly, the illumination condition and the three-dimensional shape of the images in the detected areas are corrected, before similarities are compared between feature spaces so as to judge whether two face images represent the face of mutually the same person. For example, Osamu YAMAGUCHI et al. “‘SmartFace’: A Robust Face Recognition System under Varying Facial Pose and Expression”, (Transactions of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, D-II, Vol. J84-D-II, No. 6, June 2001, pp. 1045-1052) discloses a picture processing apparatus that uses a processing configuration in which a face area detection process is followed by a face feature point detection process, a face area image normalizing process, and an identifying process (i.e., to judge whether two or more face images represent the face of mutually the same person) that is performed by comparing the levels of similarity with reference to a registered face dictionary.
However, when the method in which the feature amounts in the face images are compared with each other is used as described above, it takes time to perform the processes of making corrections before generating the feature amounts and determining the similarities within the feature spaces. Thus, in an environment in which sufficient processing resources are not available, or with a picture that lasts for a long period of time such as recorded contents, a problem arises where the more face images there are to serve as the targets of a classifying process, an attribute assigning process, and an association making process, the more difficult it becomes to perform the processing at a high speed.